OLUSEGUN ADENIYI pays tribute to Jacob Olupona, scholar and Professor of African Religious Traditions at Harvard Divinity School When I wrote in this column back in February that Professor Jacob Kehinde Olupona, my mentor of two decades, had turned 75, the words had to travel to reach him. He was already back in Boston by the time the piece was published, receiving from that distance an outpouring that included a congratulatory message from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who called him a beacon of excellence for the entire African continent. This Saturday, the 25th of July, in Ife, that distance finally closes. Family, former students, colleagues and a lifetime of admirers gather to do what a newspaper column cannot: look the man in the eye and say thank you. For those who may not know him, a brief accounting may be necessary here. Olupona holds a joint appointment at Harvard as the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies, a department he now chairs, and Professor of African Religious Traditions at Harvard Divinity School, where he has taught since arriving from the University of California, Davis, in 2006. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He carries the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM), honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Abuja and his beloved Obafemi Awolowo University, as well as the 2018 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. Three separate festschrifts, volumes of scholarship assembled by former students in his honour, the most recent edited by Professor David Ogungbile, exist because the people Olupona trained wanted a permanent record of what he gave them. But that is not why many people are travelling to Ife this weekend.  For two decades, Olupona has been the one of the few persons I go to whenever I need to think something through properly, about Nigeria, faith, and the peculiar work of holding on to what is true about ourselves while the world keeps insisting we explain it in someone else’s terms. Every time I am in Boston, I am a guest in his home, and what opens as the usual Nigerian lamentation tends to close somewhere richer, on the memoir he is still writing, and why a scholar’s first duty is to take seriously what everyone else has already decided isn’t worth studying. That instinct has shaped Olupona’s entire career. He left the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1975 with a degree in Religious Studies, did his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) primary assignment at the then Kwara State College of Technology, Ilorin, and returned the following year to the old University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) as a young lecturer. An ‘Nsukka Boy,’ as some of his colleagues privately called him, not entirely as a compliment. He spent 16 years at the University of California, Davis before Harvard came calling in 2006 at age 55. Two decades on, he remains on the campus. Along the way, Olupona helped found the African Association for the Study of Religion, developed what he calls an ‘indigenous hermeneutics’ for reading African religious life on its own terms rather than through borrowed categories, and produced, in 2011, the book that remains his defining statement, ‘City of 201 Gods: Ile-Ife in Time, Space and the Imagination.’ But ask the people converging on Ife this weekend what Olupona means to them, and most will not start with the books. They will tell you about the Ife Institute of Advanced Studies, which he built to give early-career and doctoral scholars from across Africa two weeks each year of mentoring, workshops and the kind of unhurried scholarly conversation our universities too rarely make room for. They will tell you that when Harvard once awarded him a substantial prize with his name on it, he redirected the funds toward a semester-long postdoctoral position for a junior scholar in West African religious traditions. They will tell you that when Harvard’s own graduate students wanted to honour a teacher, it was his name they wrote down for the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award. In a recent interview reflecting on his own schooling, Olupona spoke fondly of teachers he half-joked Nigeria may no longer deserve, men and women whose calibre he says he still measures his Harvard students against. It is not hard to see the throughline: the son of an Anglican Church Bishop formed by a parish’s insistence on serious teaching grew into a scholar who has spent the back half of his career rebuilding one mentee at a time, the very culture of serious teaching he worries the rest of us let slip. I have told before, in this column, of the afternoon in 2020 when a passing remark reconnected Olupona and his wife, Dupe, with a woman I knew as Mummy Awa, widow of the late Professor Eme Awa, who was briefly chairman of the National Electoral Commission (NEC) under the military re
Don't miss out on breaking stories and in-depth articles.
